Wilhelm Pieck. A Biography

Research Project of Marcus Schönewald

The biography of Wilhelm Pieck (1876-1960) who was Co-Chairman of the SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) from 1946 to 1954 and President of the GDR from 1949 to 1960 has remained largely unnoticed in recent decades. But there is scarcely a politician and party functionary more suitable for a biographical perspective on German communism in the first half of the 20th Century: Pieck’s life built a bridge from the German Kaiserreich to the early years of the GDR. He was the only politician who was a continuous member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (KPD) from her founding in 1918/19 to her absorption in the SED 1946. Furthermore, he was a multi-functionary in exceptional extents who held a variety of offices in parallel, thereby connecting different and often separated fields of communist politics in one person.
 
In the biography planned, Wilhelm Pieck is therefore not only to be represented as a social-democratic and communist official, as a party leader and the first representative of the former GDR. Rather, I would like to use the peculiarities of Pieck’s curriculum vitae in order to ask for the constancy of social democratic patterns of interpretation and action and to investigate the importance of generational affiliation for political action firstly; secondly, to take a differentiated view on the mechanisms of power and the policy styles within the KPD and SED; and thirdly to analyze communist politics as an every day experienced entanglement of very different fields of action with often widely differing norms, identities and logics of action.